As a teenager I took an extended detour through some Evangelical churches before returning to the church of my infant baptism, Rome. Oddly, that moment came when I was walking in the footsteps of C. S. Lewis through Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and bought a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. The combination of Lewis’s argument for Purgatory in Letters to Malcolm and a few choice passages in the middle of Chesterton’s book put me back into the faith of my fathers.
But I want to take a second on Reformation Day to be thankful for my Protestant friends and my favorite Protestant authors. I’ve learned so much more about my own faith by engaging with Calvinists and Lutherans and our endless — sometimes heated –arguments about the Eucharistic discourse in John 6, how to apply Saint Paul’s teachings in Romans, or how to understand the liturgy described in the book of Hebrews. I’m grateful for the devotional writing of Dallas Willard, the theological heft of Robert Reymond’s systematic theology, the slashing apologetics of the reformed Baptist pastor James White, and the correspondence of pastors such as Douglas Wilson who seem to write faster than I can read. I’m grateful most of all for the friends and pastors I’ve known, who studied their Bibles regularly with a passion to conform their lives and hearts to the Gospel. They’ve modeled the consolations of religion to me as much as anyone in my own church. I think I’ve enjoyed being Catholic more because there are Protestants out there.
I will insist that there is nothing I need beyond the traditional Liturgy of the Roman Church and all the music. But my heart is still marked by gospel music that is so much a part of America’s heritage. Here’s one of my favorites. Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “It Won’t Be Very Long.”